‘That seems right,’ he said. He paused, then added, ‘Do you know what day it is today – as in, which day of the week?’
Juliette shrugged. ‘No,’ she replied, ‘no idea. It’s not important.’
‘I guess … I guess it isn’t,’ said Danny. But his voice sounded slightly concerned and Juliette turned to look at him.
‘What’s wrong?’ she asked.
‘Nothing, really. I mean, I suppose it’s alright, isn’t it, us just living in this world, this world of our own making – not knowing things like the date or the time?’
‘Of course it is. It’s perfect.’
‘And you – you still eat enough, don’t you? And you’re sleeping okay?’
Juliette laughed and pulled Danny closer.
‘Stop worrying so much,’ she said. ‘Of course I do. Trust me, I’ve never felt better, never felt as good as I do when I’m with you.’
They stood out on the balcony together until the fireworks finished, and when the last sparks fell in a shower from the sky, they led one another inside, closing the door and the curtains behind them – leaving that other world behind again – and they lowered themselves to the lounge room floor and made love, over and over, with Danny whispering in Juliette’s ear, ‘Well, if it is Valentine’s Day, I guess we should be making the most of it, shouldn’t we?’
The following day, Juliette noticed that her phone was ringing much more often than usual. Each time she heard it she attempted to ignore it, to let it ring out, thinking that that would be the end of it – but each time it immediately started up again. Its persistent tones eventually beginning to grate on her, and finally she followed the cord to the wall and yanked it out of the power point. Danny watched her with a strange look on his face.
‘Why did you do that?’ he asked eventually. ‘Why didn’t you just answer it?’
‘Because I’m not interested in speaking to anyone but you. Those people out there – beyond these walls – they’re not real, they don’t really exist, not in the way that we do.’
‘Won’t they try you on your mobile?’ he asked.
‘No,’ she replied, ‘the battery’s been dead for days – I don’t bother to charge it anymore.’
‘What about when you run out of food?’
Juliette shrugged.
‘Stop worrying,’ she said. She was starting to feel agitated now. ‘I have plenty and I don’t need much.’
Danny let the matter drop.
Later that afternoon, Juliette and Danny were in bed together – where they increasingly spent most of their time – and Danny was treating Juliette to a completely one-sided experience. He had pushed her down onto the bed and told her to close her eyes. As she’d felt his hands on her skin, her body had begun to pulse under his touch. She’d felt fingertips, tracing their way down her body. It felt insanely good, it was as though he was everywhere all at once. There was a tongue on her left nipple, circling, licking, biting. There were lips on her lips, kissing her, over and over, and then she had felt hands, stroking her legs, and hot breath, blowing against her inner thighs. Slowly, she had slid her own hands down her body, where they tugged the cotton material of her underwear to one side.
Her breathing had increased as she waited and her body shuddered with the agony of anticipation. ‘Taste me,’ she moaned, ‘Oh God, Danny, taste me.’
And then she had felt it –his hot tongue had plunged its way in. She gasped and arched her back, while his hands pressed against her hips, holding her down as the tongue continued to flicker in and out of her.
As her desire to come continued to build and build, she bucked her hips and dug her teeth into her bottom lip. One hand reached out to grasp the sheet, and she gathered it into folds, squeezing tight as she came closer and closer. And then suddenly he stopped.
Her body tensed and she lay still, waiting. What was wrong? Why had he stopped? She pressed her thighs together to supress the sharp tingling that came from being left suddenly. And then Danny had moved up the bed next to her, to whisper in her ear, his warm breath tickling her skin, ‘There’s someone at the door.’
Juliette lay still, straining her ears for the sound of someone knocking.
‘I can’t hear anything,’ she said.
‘Trust me,’ Danny replied, ‘I can sense them – there’s definitely someone out there.
‘So? Ignore it,’ she said dismissively. ‘They’ll go away.’
‘Go on,’ Danny replied. ‘Just see who it is – you’ll get rid of them faster that way. I’ll wait in here for you.’
Juliette groaned with frustration, pressing her hands between her legs to soothe the pain of unrequited desire.
‘Oh alright, fine,’ she said eventually. She sat up, grabbed a t-shirt from the floor and pulled a skirt up over her hips, not bothering with underwear. At the front door, she paused briefly to smooth her tangled hair and then she swung open the door, eager to get rid of whoever it was as quickly as possible.
When she saw his face, she was overcome with a strange sensation. It was almost as though she had to squint her eyes in order to focus on him properly. It took her a moment to figure out who it was, why there was even someone at her door and then she realised that he was speaking to her, but it was as though his voice was muffled, like there was a wall between them, a barrier that was blocking any real contact. The air around her seemed thick, like she was surrounded by a field of mist. Very gradually, her mind began to swim, her thoughts began to soften at the edges.
Eventually, she took in the sight of the box in his arms and worked out who this man standing at her door was. Chris from the bookstore. But why? She hadn’t ordered any books from them this month. He was saying something over and over and she frowned and shook her head at him, confused.
‘You’ll have to speak up,’ she said, ‘I can’t understand you.’
‘I said, one of your neighbours let me in – I don’t think that your buzzer is working.’
‘Oh, right, sorry.’
‘Suzanne was worried,’ he added. ‘You don’t normally miss an order – and she’s been trying to contact you, but she couldn’t get through. Anyway, she asked me to bring you a few books – on the house. She wanted to make up for that last order that we stuffed up. That I screwed up. Can I?’ He gestured with the box – he wanted to bring them inside.
‘No,’ said Juliette immediately, slightly alarmed. ‘I’ll just take them from you.’
She reached out for the box, and when their hands touched she pulled back quickly with a small yelp – an electric shock had sparked between them when they’d made contact.
‘Static electricity,’ said Juliette, with a small laugh. But when she looked back up at Chris, she saw that he wasn’t laughing. In fact, he looked frightened, or concerned. And even more strange, his whole body seemed to be blurring at the edges. Juliette frowned. She needed to get rid of this guy – she had to get back to her real world, with Danny.
‘Look, just leave the box there will you?’ she asked, waving her hand at the floor. ‘I’ll take it inside. Do I need to sign or something?’
‘No, it’s fine,’ he said, but he was still looking worried, and he hadn’t put the box down yet.
‘Juliette,’ he added, ‘is everything okay?’
But his voice was becoming garbled again, and Juliette just smiled politely at him and said once again, ‘Honestly, it’s fine, just leave them there, I’m … I’m in the middle of something.’
Finally, Chris gave in. He placed the box carefully by her feet and then turned reluctantly to leave. As she watched him walk down the corridor, she noticed that the further away he walked from her front door, the more he blurred around the edges. She shrugged, though – whatever was happening didn’t interest her.
‘Good, thanks,’ she mumbled to herself, and then she reached down to grab hold of the box and drag it inside, desperate to get the front door shut, to block out the strange outside world, to return to her real life.
; The moment she shut the door, everything came back into focus, the world felt sharper. Her body visibly relaxed and she sighed with relief. For a moment she remembered the way that she used to calm herself down, how she used to clear her thoughts when she felt troubled: by baking. But she hadn’t cooked in weeks now. Somehow she’d slowly forgotten about her passion for baking. She’d quickly abandoned her mission as well – her plan to leave those anonymous gifts by her neighbour’s doors. She didn’t really feel as though she was missing it, however.
In fact, it was funny that Danny had recently started asking her what she was going to do about food – because now that she thought about, she wasn’t really sure of the last time she’d eaten.
You’re my food source now, she thought to herself. You’re the one who gives me life.
Chapter Twelve
A few days later, early in the afternoon, there was yet another knock at Juliette’s front door. Once again, she didn’t hear it at first and it was Danny who told her that there was someone waiting.
‘I’m not answering it this time,’ she said petulantly. ‘I don’t want to speak with anyone else and I don’t want to see anyone either. It just messes with my head. Those people out there, they’re fake, weird, unreal. They’re ghosts.’
But after several minutes it became clear she wasn’t going to be able to ignore the constant pounding at her door, because now it was joined by a voice.
‘Juliette,’ the voice called. ‘Juliette, I know you’re in there. Open the damn door or I’ll get a key from the building manager and I’ll open it myself.’
It actually took Juliette several seconds to recognise the voice – a voice that had once been so familiar to her that she would have recognised it from across a crowded room. But now, today, it seemed so distant, so unlikely, that she really had to concentrate to believe that the voice she was hearing belonged to who she thought it did.
It was her mother, Eve.
But how could that be? Her mother lived in France, and not only that, Eve had never left her home country. How could she possibly be here – several thousand miles from her home?
Eve’s voice continued, this time it was a stream of French words.
‘Juliette! Pour l’amour de Dieu. Tu ouvres cette porte à l’instant!’
She was demanding that Juliette open up the door. Juliette realised that she was going to have to comply, that her mother would not give up until she did. She turned to face Danny.
‘Wait in the bedroom,’ she instructed him. ‘I won’t let her in, I’ll get rid of her as quickly as possible.’
Danny nodded and moved away into the bedroom, and Juliette walked cautiously towards the front door. This was going to be difficult – but she was not a child, her mother was just going to have to understand that she was no longer a part of Juliette’s world. That she didn’t need her. That she had everything she needed right here.
When she finally opened the door, the world began to spin and fog up. Her mother’s features, once so familiar and so reassuring, were blurred and strange.
‘What is it, Mother?’ she asked, keeping a firm grasp on the door for support, trying not to lose her balance as the world swayed about her.
‘What is it!’ Eve looked incredulous at having been asked such a question. Then she seemed to really take in the sight of Juliette, of her shrinking body, her glazed over eyes, her trembling hands.
‘Juliette! Mon Dieu!’
In one smooth motion she pushed the door open and swept into the apartment, past Juliette.
‘What’s happened to you?’ she asked, her voice a hushed whisper.
‘Mother,’ said Juliette, attempting to keep her voice level, trying hard to fight through the haze that was beginning to envelop her. It felt as though the longer her mother was in there with her, the more the fog was spreading, overtaking her precious world.
‘Mother, you need to leave. You can’t be here. You’re going to ruin everything for us.’
‘Us?’ Eve shouted. ‘What do you mean us? Who else is here with you? What have you gotten yourself into? Is it drugs? Juliette! What have you been taking, what have you done to yourself?’
The louder her mother’s voice grew, the more Juliette felt her world tilting, shifting. Her stomach was becoming nauseous, her vision swirled.
‘Mum,’ she begged, ‘Mum, you have to get out, before it’s too late …’ But the last words were swallowed up as her voice cracked and then she was lurching forwards, collapsing under the weight of these two worlds colliding, and Eve was just barely able to catch her and stop her from banging her head against the hall table as she fell to the floor.
When Juliette woke, she lay still with her eyes closed. She was enjoying the feel of the comfortable mattress beneath her. She imagined that right now, downstairs her father was probably cooking breakfast. On the weekends, he always liked to prepare a gourmet feast for her and her mother. It would usually keep them full until dinner, and it consisted of a mix of French and English foods and any other type of cuisine that interested him at the time. Homemade chocolate-filled croissants, a platter of freshly cut fruit, smoked salmon, poached eggs that he expertly swirled in a pot of boiling water, bacon dipped in maple syrup, ricotta cheese drizzled with honey. The varieties of food were always endless. The coffee would be brewing – she could almost smell the rich beans filtering though the house. Her mother would be outside in the garden – she liked to water her snowbells and poppies first thing, before breakfast. Juliette took one more moment to savour the feeling of safety, of happiness, of belonging and then she opened her eyes.
All of a sudden, she was hit with a wave of dizziness as the room she saw around her was not the one she expected. Instead of the buttercup yellow walls, the high ceiling with the ornate cornices, the huge bay window with the wooden shutters, she saw crisp white walls, a lower ceiling set with downlights and heavy drapes hiding the doors to her balcony. The severe disorientation made her squeeze her eyes shut tight as she scrambled to understand. To grasp hold of the situation. She wasn’t back in her childhood home, in France, she was in her apartment, in Sydney – the one she shared with Danny. From there, the previous events came tumbling back in a rush: her mother arriving, the shift to her world, Danny! Would he still be here? Or had her mother destroyed everything for her?
As she sat up she heard the creak of the bedroom door opening and her shoulders relaxed with relief – it was Danny, he was still here, everything was okay. But he looked weak, as though he was starting to fade away again, and as she watched, he fell back and seemed to become swallowed up by the wall. Eve’s face appeared around the door then, and as she moved into the room, Juliette was filled with rage.
‘You!’ she screamed at her mother, flying forwards onto her hands and knees, tearing at the sheets. ‘What have you done? You shouldn’t have come here – he’ll be gone again. You’ll ruin everything – he won’t be able to hold on, not with another presence in the apartment, messing with our world, screwing up our perfect life.’
Eve had stopped still at the doorway, her face white with shock as Juliette raged at her.
‘Juliette,’ she whispered, ‘I thought that once you slept …’
‘How long?’ Juliette screamed as she flung herself out of the bed and staggered on uneasy legs towards her mother. ‘How long have I slept for?’
‘I don’t— I don’t know,’ stammered Eve, ‘Maybe six … seven hours?’
‘Seven hours?’ Pushing past her mother and out into the hallway, she stumbled towards the lounge room.
‘Danny,’ she cried out, ‘Danny, what has she done to you? Are you still here? You must be still here!’
Eve followed her close behind.
‘Juliette?’ she asked, her voice a desperate plea. ‘What on earth are you talking about?’
Juliette ignored her, continuing her search for her husband.
‘Danny! Where are you?’
‘Juliette, sweetheart, please. Danny is dead. He died over
seven months ago.’
Juliette swung around to face her mother.
‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ she spat. ‘He can’t have died, he was here with me, just now – before you came in and frightened him away. He’s alive. He’s alive and he’s real.’
Eve started to speak again but Juliette held up a hand to hush her.
‘Quiet,’ she commanded. ‘I need to concentrate. He might be trying to reach me. I can’t listen with you here, with you confusing everything, clouding it all. Just be quiet.’
Juliette stood still in the centre of the room. She pressed her fingertips against her temples, slowed her breathing and focused inwards, searching, begging. She had done it once before, she had brought Danny to her, helped him to grow in strength, she would do it again.
As she listened, her eyes shut tightly, she began to hear a far-off voice. It was almost unintelligible – but it was there. She followed it with her mind, travelling through the darkness, drawing it to her. It grew stronger, louder, clearer. She started to make out words.
You have to get Eveout of here, Juliette, before it’s too late. Make her leave, please, baby, make her go.
Juliette’s eyes flew open, she swung around to face her mother again and then opened her mouth and bellowed, ‘OUT!’
She could see the fear in her mother’s face but she didn’t care. She strode towards her, more sure of herself than ever.
‘You have to leave, Mother. NOW.’
Eve was backing away from her, her face a mixture of despair and shock. But Juliette was pushing her now, forcing her towards the doorway.
‘Danny and I love each other,’ she said. ‘You can’t keep us apart. You can’t and you won’t.’
The last words Eve said as she was pushed out through the door were, ‘I’m not giving up, Juliette. I’ll be back. I won’t give up on you.’
But Juliette didn’t hear them – she slammed the door shut and then turned and rushed to the bedroom, where Danny had vanished through the wall. That was the place where she would find him again, where she would bring him back, make him whole once more.
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